Award-winning Teaching in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics
In the Spring of 2013, Prof. Ardell won the Academic Senate Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching in recognition of excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentorship. Prof. Ardell would like to thank his students and colleagues in the Molecular Cell Biology unit, the School of Natural Sciences, and his Senate Colleagues for their kind support and recognition!
Bio 2: Introduction to Molecular Biology
Prof. Ardell will next teach Bio 2 in Fall of 2014. The course covers Chapters 1-11 of Essential Cell Biology, 3rd. Ed. by Alberts Et Al (“Skinny Alberts”). Here are some recommended resources for learning molecular biology:
- The illustrations of David Goodsell. I recommend his latest book The Machinery of Life, 2nd. Ed. which is available through Springer but not widely available in print. Thanks to the libraries access to the Springer Ebook collection, UC Merced students can access the full text.
- Ribosome Movies by the lab of Nobel prize-winner Venki Ramakrishnan
Bio 182/QSB 282 Bioinformatics
Prof. Ardell teaches a semester upper-division/graduate course in Bioinformatics next offered in the Spring of 2014. This UNIX-based course follows a toolkit approach that gives students much more power over their data without programming.
Computational Biology Journal Club
Prof. Ardell co-founded UC Merced’s Computational Biology Journal Club in which participants both review current content and pick their own abstracts and articles to present to the group.
Outreach
In 2007, Prof. Ardell’s taught BLAST theory and practice for comparative genomics at the EMBO Course in Bioinformatics and Comparative Genome Analysis at the Institut Pasteur of Tunis organized by Profs. Fredj Tekaia and Alia Benkahla.